General

ryushin: Is there any PR tools that are usueful for indie artists besides trusty old promo emails? I'm probably not your average music fan (if there is such a thing) but ... Looking in from the other end, where do I find new music? Word of mouth, especially in the case of live music. On podcasts I subscribe to, most of them specialising in specific kinds of music. Either by genres, like; electronic: Deep INsessioNZ hip-hop: BFM's True School ska: the sadly missed 100% ska Or by cross-genre slices, like; CC music: BugCast, NetWaves, Radio BSOTS Local music: 95bFM's Freak the Sheep Or slice on both angles, like; The Block Report (hip-hop) the also sadly missed Open MetalCast Other than that, I go to search portals which I know have a reasonably broad index; Free Music Archive, sometimes searched via open.audio, which is a fediverse-connected service set up by the original developers of FunkWhale, with similar goals to libre.fm BandCamp YouTub I used to read music magazines voraciously, back in the days when I used to trawl through the bargain bins in record stores. But I never really made the transition to reading music blogs. Although I do occasionally read articles on BC and listen to the accompanying playlist, and I'd be excited to dig into a federated version of this. If I'm the sort of person you think might enjoy your music, these are the sorts of places to get it featured. As @KristofferLislegaard says, the question to ask is; KristofferLislegaard: Where does my target audience hang out. ... and look for opportunities to get your music on those stages.

Ah I missed this thread! Great posts here, with great points. I think this idea of “frictionless” music listening, where all the choices are being made by unaccountable algorithms, is what we’re struggling against. It’s a similar situation to radio: mainstream corpo radio where the DJs can’t even choose what they want to play. Human curation is relegated to smaller, community efforts. But because the idea of “choosing and buying singles or albums” is now so niche (physical or download), the likes of Spotify are now kinda the only game in town when it comes to music discovery. And, as @anon78643841 points out, being supported by their system isn’t even that great. So definitely, we have to rebuild our smaller DIY communities, and find ways to connect our communities together to rebuild DIY networks. ActivityPub is a lovely hub for that, in my experience, and similarly IRL community building like regular nights with different performers.

I guess I'm wondering if artists should have an opportunity to opt in (or out). I'm not sure why really, but I feel like we all put our music on BC with the expectation around how a listener would experience it. That is, they'd go to our BC page, look at a release, maybe read liner notes, choose what song to play, look at the cover art, etc. We have some agency around that experience. Whereas with playlists, we might have no control over how our music is experienced. Certainly, playlists have the potential to increase traffic to our Bandcamp pages, and that's great. But some artists might value maintaining control over that user experience, for whatever reason. They ought to have that opportunity.